This story from the perspective of the Thing did get into the notion of what it would be like to be an amorphous consciousness (and how odd it is that Earthlings aren’t). It’s still a little different, though, from the trajectory of being human and then realizing what it’s like to be multi-human. A version with Pod People would be a different kind of story...
Jim Pivarski
Karma: 168
Cool! I’ll read that one, too, thanks!
What I was thinking about with the pod people was their group mentality. (After all, it has long been considered a metaphor for communism.) I’d like to see someone imagine—or do it myself—the poddified people not as soulless outer shells of their former selves, but as themselves, “melted” into a group consciousness. As an example of something similar, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, “The Wish” did an excellent job showing characters who remained themselves, but as evil versions of themselves, as vampires.
In the Invasion of the Body Snatchers and its remakes, the reason the poddified people are hard to distinguish from their former selves is because they’re good at mimicry. They were only pretending to be their former selves. However, if one person’s consciousness really isn’t distinct from another’s in a fundamental way, just by a much thinner channel of communication than that between the parts of one’s brain, then thickening the channel of communication between people by telepathy would probably feel like a kind of awakening—realizing that there are all these other parts of you that had been hidden until now. These people would probably talk and act as they did in the Body Snatcher movies: they’d tell the anti-pod antagonists that there’s nothing to fear from poddification, that they haven’t lost anything, they’ve only gained a wider consciousness, etc., while the antagonists recoil in horror because it’s a threat to their individuality. Whenever someone is poddified, they change their mind not because they’ve been overcome, but because now they, too, see what they’ve been missing.
Personally, I can’t say which side I’d be on. It would be underwhelming for the author of this remake to just reverse the moral (individualism is bad; all is one, baby!). It is horrific to think of one’s personality melting into a larger brain. Also, the end-state of that is sopolistic: there would be only one consciousness, with no one to talk to. (But then again, wanting to talk to others is wanting to thicken the connections between bits of consciousness, so that’s the same thing again.)
Although G.K. Chesterton wildly misunderstood other cultures and was triumphalist about his own, I’ve always rather liked this image from The Romance of Orthodoxy (1908):
The oriental deity is like a giant who should have lost his leg or hand and be always seeking to find it; but the Christian power is like some giant who in a strange generosity should cut off his right hand, so that it might of its own accord shake hands with him.
What this “nuclear consciousness” mental model doesn’t have is an account of knowing someone without being that someone. But then, is there such a thing?
That’s why I’d like to see a rewrite of the Body Snatchers: to explore that idea, even if it doesn’t come to a solid conclusion.
But if that observer is in the universe, then there’s more in the universe than just the circle.
I was examining this universe from the outside. We can’t actually do that, though we act as though we do in the physical sciences. (One idea in the physical sciences that takes seriously the fact that experimenters are a part of the universe they observe is superdeterminism, and it’s one of the possible loopholes for Bell’s Inequality.)
The goal of physics
Panpsychism! (Sort of!) But I guess that makes sense, since panpsychism is trying to make sense of divisibility of consciousness, too.
I will read it, thanks!
Nuclear consciousness
Sorry that I didn’t notice your comment before. You took it the one extra step of getting kinetic and rotational energy in the same units. (I had been trying to compare potential and rotational energy and gave up when there were quantities that would have to be numerically evaluated.)
Yeah, I follow your algebra. The radius of the ball cancels and we only have to compare and . Indeed, a uniformly solid sphere (an assumption I made) rolling without sliding without change in potential energy (at the end of the ramp) has 29% rotational energy and 71% linear kinetic energy, independently of its radius and mass. That’s a cute theorem.
It also means that my “physics intuition trained on similar examples in the past” was wrong, because I was imagining a “negligible” that is much smaller than 29%. I was imagining something less than about 5% or so. So the neural network in my head is apparently not very well trained. (It’s been about 30 years since I did these sorts of problems as a physics major in college, if that can be an excuse.)
As for your second paragraph, it would matter for solving the article’s problem because if you used the ball’s initial height and assumed that all of the gravitational potential energy was converted into kinetic energy to do the second part of the problem, “how far, horizontally, will the ball fly (neglecting air resistance and such)?” you would overestimate that kinetic energy by almost a third, and how much you overestimate would depend on how much it slipped. Still, though, the floppy track would eat up a big chunk, too.
Sorry—I addressed one bout of undisciplined thinking (in physics) and then tacked on a whole lot more undisciplined thinking in a different subject (AI alignment, which I haven’t thought about nearly as much as people here have).
I could delete the last two paragraphs, but I want to think about it more and maybe bring it up in a place that’s dedicated to the subject.
It might not matter in the grand scheme of things, but my comment above has been on my mind for the last few days. I didn’t do a good job of demonstrating the thing I set out to argue for, that effect X is negligible and can be ignored. That’s the first step in any physics problem, since there are infinitely many effects that could be considered, but only enough time to compute a few of them in detail.
The first respondent made the mistake of using the challenger’s intentions as data—she knew it was a puzzle that was expected to be solvable in a reasonable amount of time, so she disregarded defects that would be too difficult to calculate. That can be a useful criterion in video games (“how well does the game explain itself?”), it can be exploited in academic tests, though it defeats the purpose to do so, and it’s useless in real-world problems. Nature doesn’t care how easy or hard a problem is.
I didn’t do a good job demonstrating that X is negligible compared to Y because I didn’t resolve enough variables to put them into the same units. If I had shown that X’ and Y’ are both in units of energy and X’ scales linearly with a parameter that is much larger than the equivalent in Y’, while everything else is order 1, that would have been a good demonstration.
If I were just trying to solve the problem and not prove it, I wouldn’t have bothered because I knew that X is negligible than Y without even a scaling argument. Why? The answer physicists give in this situation is “physics intuition,” which may sound like an evasion. But in other contexts, you find physicists talking about “training their intuition,” which is not something that birds or clairvoyants do with their instincts or intuitions. Physicists intentionally use the neural networks in their heads to get familiarity with how big certain quantities are relative to each other. When I thought about effects X and Y in the blacked-out comment above, I was using familiarity with the few-foot drop the track represented, the size and weight of a ball you can hold in your hand, etc. I was implicitly bringing prior experience into this problem, so it wasn’t really “getting it right on the first try.” It wasn’t the first try.
It might be that any problem has some overlap with previous problems—I’m not sure that a problem could be posed in an intelligible way if it were truly novel. This article was supposed to be a metaphor for getting AI to understand human values. Okay, we’ve never done that before. But AI systems have some incomplete overlap with how “System 1” intelligence works in human brains, some overlap with a behavioralist conditioned response, and some overlap with conventional curve-fitting (regression). Also, we somehow communicate values with other humans, defining the culture in which we live. We can tell how much they’re instinctive versus learned by how isolated cultures are similar or different.
I think this comment would get too long if I continue down this line of thought, but don’t we equalize our values by trying to please each other? We (humans) are a bit dog-like in our social interactions. More than trying to form a logically consistent ethic, we continually keep tabs on what other people think of us and try to stay “good” in their eyes, even if that means inconsistency. Maybe AI needs to be optimized on sentiment analysis, so when it starts trying to kill all the humans to end cancer, it notices that it’s making us unhappy, or whimpers in response to a firm “BAD DOG” and tap on the nose...
This looks a lot like a typical high school/college freshman physics problem, and I guess the moral of the story is that it leads us to think that we should solve it that way. But if you were to work it out,
I think the ball’s rotational energy would be a much smaller number than the gravitational potential energy of falling a few feet. The rotational energy of a solid sphere is , where and are the mass and radius of the ball and is the angular velocity of rotation. Meanwhile, the gravitational potential energy is , where . There are some quantities whose values we don’t know, like , but looking at the set-up, I seriously doubt that rotational energy, or lack thereof because the ball doesn’t stick to the track, is going to matter.
Fun fact: Galileo didn’t drop weights off the Leaning Tower of Pisa; he rolled balls down slopes like this. He completely ignored/didn’t know about rotational energy, and that was an error in his measurements, but it was small enough to not change the final result. He also used his heartbeat as a stopwatch.
I think the biggest effect here is the bendy track. It’s going to absorb a lot (like ) of the energy, and can’t be ignored. Alison uses the questioner’s motives as data (“Calculating the effect of the ramp’s bendiness seems unreasonably difficult and this workshop is only meant to take an hour or so, so let’s forget that.”), which she shouldn’t.
Wow! That looks like a great book. Although one can find out by following the links you provided, I’d like to tell everyone here that the book is available for free on the author’s website (PDF, epub, mobi).
They’re similar-sounding questions, but different.
“Do I have a headache when I’m not noticing it?” is a question about the definition of a headache. One definition is in the physical reality-box: a headache is neurological state that can be detected by a scientific instrument. Another definition is in the subjective reality-box: a headache is what I feel—I’m the only one who can say whether or not I have a headache. Some people deny that subjective reality is a kind of reality, and for them, the only real thing that can be called a headache is the one that could be detected by a scientific instrument. I’m asserting that the subjective reality is real, too, in a way that is neither superior to nor inferior to the physical reality. I thought that a headache (and maybe pain in general) would be a good example because imagine if you said, “I am in pain,” and a doctor examined you, then declared, “No, you’re wrong. You are not in pain.” The doctor might say, “I can find no cause for your pain,” or even “There is no physical cause for your pain” (a very strong statement!), but “You are not in pain” sounds like it fails a basic definition of what it means to be in pain.
“Does an unheard falling tree make a sound?” could be about the limits of scientific induction if the “sound” you mean is physical waves in the air. Based on our scientific understanding, we strongly expect mechanical disturbances to make waves, even if we don’t observe them. But if “sound” is the subjective experience of hearing sound, then it’s the same doubling I referred to above: the vibrating air is one thing, the quale of hearing sound is another.
“Does an automobile that will no longer automatically mobilize itself still an automobile?” is a different kind of question. That’s related to but different from the ship of Theseus, about recognizing composite objects by form or function. If the mass of atoms can’t be used to do what cars do—drive—then it seems we have no business calling it a car, but this particular mass of atoms previously worked as a car. Similarly, you could ask if it’s still a car between times when it’s being driven, since not having gasoline go through the engine makes it temporarily immobile, just as a car on blocks could be temporarily immobile, could be permanently immobile, depending on its future. Sure, there are philosophical questions there, but they’re different questions from the one I was trying to raise.
Interesting: I’ve had the same thought and did the same experiment, though it wasn’t a tooth removal, but some tooth-drilling that I was assured would not be touching a nerve. The normal anesthesia would have been local Novocaine, and I hate how Novocaine feels for the rest of the day. (So it was a choice between two sensations, over two different time periods.) Without the Novocaine, it was like a distant, dull pounding, like falling on a bone, which can be managed. I did this more than once, but my current dentist argued more strongly against it and I acquiesced rather easily.
The main thing I was worried about was controlling my body—I didn’t want to flail and disrupt the dentist.
Just like you (and Celia Green) said about the preparation involved, I’d make a distinction between unexpected pain and expected-and-prepared-for pain. You can affect how you feel about a dentist visit, but not a sudden, stabbing pain in the back. (That may be a System-1, System-2 thing.) I’ve also found that I can relax into something cold—sitting on a stone in winter—but not something hot—being near a fire. We can choose to modify our will about some things, but others are too low-level and force themselves upon us from below.
(Which is part of the topic of “mind breaks down into smaller pieces” that I’m thinking about.)
Having a headache and not having a headache
I understand the softness of categories, and I don’t mind that you would use the available data to not put me in the Christian box. Some things that you don’t see are that I engage in Catholic practices, like going to mass (which is precisely why I canned an earlier draft and I’m writing again now).
If I gave the impression that Jesus is an iteration in general improvement of morality, then I mischaracterized my belief and my community’s: we believe that Jesus is God—whatever that means. I have to add the “whatever that means” because it seems like a doctrine that deliberately confounds logic, like the bit about Buddha here, when paired with Christians’ transcendent notion of God. If we thought of gods as giants who lived on Mt. Olympus, then one of them becoming physical like Zeus-the-swan wouldn’t be a problem, but we go out of our way to describe God as being more like Plato’s Zeus, which is everything that a limited, embodied, human being isn’t. Catholics emphasize saints as evidence of continuing improvement, and the apostles are often portrayed as not understanding what was happening, but Jesus (and Mary) are untouchable.
On the other hand, I look at stories like Matthew 15:27, in which a Canaanite woman appears to teach Jesus about tolerance—at the beginning of the story, it seems like he didn’t know. Most people I talk to say that it was like Socratic questioning—he really did know—but maybe the divine part of him is that he caught on and accepted the correction? While God-as-hypostatic perfection can’t learn and improve (being outside of time), God-as-a-human being can and this is what it looks like? That sort of consideration is in the “whatever that means” phrase I used above.
Okay, now on the point about not mentioning heaven: not many people that I know do. Whereas I had to clarify that we follow the Jesus-is-God doctrine—quite heavily, it’s a frequent topic—I usually only hear about heaven at funerals. While I’m sure that the people around me believe in it as “consciousness does not extinguish at death,” the subject of heaven and hell come with a heavy dose of “this terminology/imagery is metaphorical.” They’d be quick to point out that heaven (and hell) is not a “place” and I think some popes have made comments about hell being a state and not a place. (In particular, I remember one from the 90′s, but that would be a few popes ago.)
You’re right that the 2 Thessalonians letter sounds like demons eating your guts, and anything in the canonical set of books is considered as writing inspired by God (with or without their authors’ understanding)—it doesn’t matter that the writer claims to be Paul and might have not been Paul. (Attributing works to your group’s founder seems to have been more common in the ancient world. I think it’s not controversial that there were three “Isaiahs.”)
Two things about that, though: Catholics don’t put equal weight on everything in the Bible—they’re all above a certain threshold of importance, but not equally important—and there’s no actual fire and brimstone imagery in it, mostly just about being “shut out,” the kind of imagery that Jesus used, for instance, in the wise and foolish virgins parable (Matthew 25). Meanwhile, a lot of material that didn’t make it into the Bible but was influential in the early church did have more viscerally imagined rewards and punishments after death. It was an idea that was in the air at the time in Judaism (except for the Sadducees), and only got a little bit into the canonical Bible.
So, clearly, Catholics would hold that there’s some kind of good and bad afterlife, and most of what I’ve heard has that you’ll either be “with God” or “not,” and not being with God is the bad thing in itself, irrespective of any gut-eating demons. Depictions of heaven and hell like C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce are popular. (Napoleon Bonaparte is all alone in a huge mansion, repeating to himself that it was everyone else’s fault...)
As for “No one comes to the Father except through me,” I had never connected that to the afterlife before; it has always seemed more like a general coming-to-Jesus saying (in life, for the sake of living, not specifically the afterlife).
It is the case (my impression, which would be interesting to verify with a survey because it’s an easy-to-ask question) that Catholics believe that there are non-Christians “with God” after death, i.e. in heaven. Even if they have to weasel out of some suggestively worded biblical passages (e.g. “good people who don’t acknowledge Christ are mystically going to the Father through Jesus”), or not even try to explain it (e.g. “God will figure it out/above my pay grade”), there’s a strong cultural current against making God look mean. Or a trickster, as you said in your original question.
Personally—maybe you’ll consider me even less of a Christian because of this—I don’t see an afterlife as something that happens to us as individuals. When there is talk about what heaven is like—hypostatic union, non-glass darkly—it doesn’t seem like much psychological continuity with one’s living ego. I’m not quite the person who inhabited this body 20 years ago, since my mind has changed a lot and what defines a person apart from their mind? So if we become outside-of-time, in-union-with-God, experiencing reality in a totally different way, how is that even me? Even following standard doctrine, the vision of heaven seems to have been exalted to such a degree that it’s no longer relevant: what I recognize of what I am will die when my body dies, and maybe something mystical that I don’t recognize goes off and does something else. But these are my own private musings (which I might change or maybe feel I have a better understanding of later) and not representative of Catholics or Christians in general.
Thank you for this response! (I have a few more books to add to my reading list.) Your post from 13 years ago is a very good explanation, too.
Ironically, though:
Here’s an experiment for everyone to try: think it good to eat babies. Don’t merely imagine thinking that: actually think it.
I have heard of an indigenous Australian tradition in which children were carefully, reverently turned into a blood-soup and consumed by the community (read in a book years ago, but there’s this online). And I do try to imagine what it’s like to live in this way. (I don’t think they considered it a normal, everyday thing to eat babies, but that the emotional shock had a power that could perhaps be used as a kind of magic.)
But I get your point; it’s like what I’ve been calling “degree of undeniableness.” (Budziszewki compares it to 2 + 2 = 4 and you compare it to observing that a red thing is red: logical deduction and physical observation can be denied, but it’s difficult to do so.) It’s very hard for me to agree that it’s good to eat babies. Even in the above-mentioned culture, I think it might have been a struggle, an aspect of society that was tossed as soon as they saw other ways of living. Maybe it’s not so much about what human attitudes exist—which covers a lot of extremes—as what’s easy to maintain and what gets tossed as soon as it’s recognized as not necessary.
(It’s not lost on me that the previous paragraph applies to all attitudes, not just ethics, but also smiling universes.)
A quibble: arguments against God in the gaps are arguments against God as an explanation of some physical phenomena. “Does the universe have a face?” (poetically speaking) is not a gap that could ever be discovered by experiment.
As you (and Yudkowsky, and eventually Hofstadter) rightly point out, there isn’t a universally compelling foundation to logic or reasons for things in general. In Reality and reality-boxes, I called the unifying feature among the uses of the word “reality” as a “degree of undeniableness,” since anything can be flat-out denied, it’s just harder to do so with some things than with others.
That all is fine when we’re talking about metaphysics that doesn’t connect with any physical measurements, but what I’d really like to know is how—without grounding—we can determine what to do. That is, how to conclude, even for one’s self, that one action is wrong and another is right (which happens every time we do even the most trivial of actions).
That’s why I was interested in the universe having a face, for the cosmos to have opinions about human actions. I’ve said elsewhere in this comment thread that I’m not very keen on that argument anymore because the mere existence—posited existence—of true good and true bad doesn’t help when our only access to ideas of good and bad are our feelings. It seems that when we’re deciding to act, we’re only pitting one set of feelings (e.g. social duty) against another (e.g. personal desires). I seem to be back to Emotivism when it comes to meta-ethics and I’m wondering if there’s a way to be convinced otherwise.
Have you ever been stuck debugging code and made a breakthrough by explaining it to someone else, even if they weren’t following what you’re saying? I think that’s happened here, so thanks for asking me the question!
The religious community I’m in is not keen on proving the physical reality of miracles, the way that some will put a lot of effort into explaining, for instance, how and why the sun stayed still in the sky when Joshua prayed for it. (My community would quickly call something like that mythological.) The miracles that my community does assert—I was wrong when I said that they don’t assert any miracles—are not an affront to physical evidence, they’re an affront to logic.
Saying “affront to logic” makes it sound bad, but these are statements that are not supposed to be logical—that’s not their social purpose. (Wrong “language game,” as Wittgenstein put it.) The positions taken on Jesus’s resurrection and the Eucharist, as described above, are not illogical but antilogical: they’re constructed in such a way as to make analysis impossible, on purpose. We didn’t just not notice that we’re saying “the Eucharist is physically body and blood” and also “materially, it’s bread,” which is an obvious contradiction, in the same way that “Tell me you’re X without telling me you’re X,” is an impossible imperative—it can’t be the same “tell” in both cases.
I’ve previously noticed this about the Trinity. Most of the early heresies were trinitarian, and it was the most reasonable-sounding theories that were rejected as heresies. One mainstream statement is, “The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father, but the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God.” That deliberately breaks the transitivity of the word “is,” so it’s not an equivalence relation. If you ask someone about the logic of that, they’ll remind you it’s a mystery, which puts it in a category of things that are not allowed to be figured out; they’re intended for contemplation.
This is sounding to me like a koan. Zen koans are also supposed to be contemplated but not solved. In mainstream Buddhism (broader than Zen), I came across this astonishing statement, that none of the following are true about the Buddha after his death:
The Buddha exists.
The Buddha does not exist.
The Buddha exists and does not exist.
The Buddha neither exists nor does not exist.
Just as the trinitarian formulation breaks transitivity, the above breaks the law of excluded middle. Or maybe not “breaks,” since it’s possible to have logical systems in which a relation is not transitive and the law of excluded middle is not used in proofs, but the people who think about these things are not in a hurry to replace them with formulations that are logically sound. That’s clearly not the point.
So it’s antilogical, which renders moot the question of whether it’s consistent with physical reality. That’s why my initial impression was, “No, they/we don’t believe in physical miracles.”
This is both interesting and (I think) an important thing to know about science: plans and strategies are systematic, but discoveries sometimes are and sometimes aren’t. In particle physics, the Omega baryon and Higgs boson were discovered in deliberate hunts, but the muon and J/psi were serendipitous. The ratio might be about half-and-half (depending on how you count particles).
Thinking about this, I have two half-answers, which may be leads as to why sweetener discovery might be discovered by serendipity, even though there are systematic searches for new drugs.
Discovery depends, to a great degree, on your detector, and I don’t think there’s a better detector of sweetness than the ones in our mouths. Presumably, searches through virtual (not synthesized) molecules can be faster, and if the identification algorithm can accurately predict activation of the sweetness receptor, then it could outperform detection by taste only because it’s faster than synthesis. But virtual drug discovery is still an open problem, still under development...
Maybe there are, in nature, only a few sweet molecules, and they were discovered early. Going through the list of artificial sweeteners you mentioned, below are the discovery dates. When were most of the systematic drug searches? Did it cover this timespan, which seems to be in the early and mid-20th century?
Saccharin: 1897
Cyclamate: 1937
Aspartame: 1965
Acesulfame potassium: 1967
Sucralose: 1976
(This suggestion also has an analogy with particle physics: hundreds of particles were discovered in the 1950′s because accelerators had just been invented that could illuminate the strong-force mass range, which has rich phenomenology. At the current frontier, though, there are very few particles.)
Other comments in the comments section that sound quite likely to me are: (1) perhaps the very sweet compounds could be smelled, which prompted chemists to try tasting them (@mako-yass), and (2) maybe some of these origin stories are scientific folklore (@d0themath). Scientists, who are very concerned to get the description of physical reality right, are surprisingly cavalier about describing their own history in an accurate way.